HOLOCAUST MUSEUM: A TROUBLED START

By Judith Miller; Judith Miller is deputy media editor of The Times. This article is adapted from her book ''One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust,'' to be published next month by Simon and Schuster.

Published: April 22, 1990

IN THE HEART OF THE NATION'S CAPITAL, in sight of the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, an extraordinary museum is slowly being built. While the other buildings around the Mall pay tribute to the nation's achievements, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will commemorate one of the world's most terrible tragedies.

When it is completed in 1993, the 250,000-square-foot national museum will be able to accommodate as many as one million visitors a year. Although the $100 million structure is America's most ambitious effort to commemorate the Holocaust, it is not the only one. In October 1980, Congress unanimously embraced in law and in the name of the American people the duty of ''Holocaust remembrance'' - through the construction of memorials and the designation of an annual Holocaust Remembrance Day (this year, it is today). Since then, commemoration projects have proliferated. A 1988 directory of Holocaust institutions lists 19 museums, 48 resource centers, 34 archives, 12 memorials, 26 research institutes and 5 libraries.

President Ronald Reagan unveiled the museum's cornerstone in October 1988. To most onlookers, the ceremony seemed an exquisite occasion of harmony and solidarity. But this was not the case. The lofty speeches and rhetoric about remembrance masked a rancor that had worsened with each of the nine years it took to bring the museum to that point. In fact, the acrimony was so intense that Elie Wiesel - the chairman of the commission that first explored the building of the museum - and others who had played important roles in the project's early days chose not to attend the ceremony.

The tensions were not primarily a result of a clash of egos, although personality differences exacerbated them. At the heart of the breach were conflicting answers to crucial questions. What is the best way to honor the memory of Holocaust victims? What sort of monument should be built? Since the Holocaust had occurred in Europe, should the memorial be a national museum in Washington? Most important, whose suffering should be included? That of the six million Jews alone? Or of the 4 million to 20 million non-Jewish victims - whose numbers depend on which historian or politician is counting?

THE IDEA OF A NATIONAL HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL was initially promoted in mid-1977 by three Jewish officials in Jimmy Carter's Administration: Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's chief domestic policy adviser; Mark A. Siegel, a liaison with the Jewish community who worked on the White House staff, and Ellen Goldstein, another staff member. Eizenstat had been concerned, he says, not only about the erosion of memory of the war among people of his generation, but also about the growing incidents of Holocaust revisionism.

Siegel asked Goldstein to prepare a memorandum on how other nations had commemorated the Holocaust and what, if anything, the United States should do. Siegel then sent President Carter a memorandum suggesting that the United States consider establishing a national memorial. The proposal went nowhere, Siegel recalls, until a year later when relations between Carter and the typically pro-Democratic Jewish community plummeted.

Carter had angered American Jewish leaders by endorsing a ''homeland'' for Palestinians. He had also overrun the usually invincible Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill when Congress approved a major sale of F-15 fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia. Siegel resigned over the sale.

In March 1978, Goldstein sent a second memorandum about a national Holocaust memorial, this time to Eizenstat, who in turn discussed the matter with the President. Three months later, Carter surprised a group of rabbis he was meeting in the Rose Garden by saying he had decided to appoint a commission to explore the construction of a Holocaust memorial.

Almost immediately, the central divisive issue emerged: how universal should the memorial be?

Although there was general agreement that the commission should be charged with deciding what kind of memorial would be appropriate, there were divergent views on its members. Anne Wexler, a Presidential aide who was the liaison with various ethnic groups and Democratic constituencies, argued that neither the commission nor the council that succeeded it in 1980 should be composed solely of Jews. The panel had to be representative of all people who had suffered at Hitler's hands during the war, she said; if the representation were not broad-based, the recommendations would not win Congressional backing.

But Wiesel - the writer and survivor of Auschwitz - insisted that the groups be composed mainly of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Slowly he accepted the membership of a few ''righteous gentiles'' - those who had helped save Jews. ''Then Anne pressed for the inclusion of Lithuanians involved in resistance against the Nazis, and Elie became very upset,'' Eizenstat recalls. ''The Lithuanians, Elie argued, had been part of the problem, not the solution.'' But Wexler prevailed.

Wiesel ultimately accepted a rather diverse group of Americans. His ''Report to the President'' on the Holocaust commission's deliberations, issued in September 1979, for the first time articulated publicly the political compromise. ''The Holocaust,'' he wrote, ''was the systematic, bureaucratic extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators as a central act of state during the Second World War; as night descended, millions of other peoples were swept into this net of death.'' Or, as he also put it, ''The universality of the Holocaust lies in its uniqueness: the Event is essentially Jewish, yet its interpretation is universal.''

In this report, Wiesel also stated: ''While not all victims were Jews, all Jews were victims.'' Hence, all would be represented in the museum. Through this artful formulation, the museum would be able to focus on the Jewish aspect of the tragedy, without denying a place in the suffering to non-Jews.

Many of the conflicts over universality sprang from the commission's initial determination that the most appropriate memorial for those who had died in the Holocaust was a ''living'' museum. According to commission members, all but one member of the panel favored the construction of a museum rather than a monument or other type of memorial. Wiesel and others felt strongly that whatever was built had to help educate people, young Americans in particular.

Lucy S. Dawidowicz, a leading (Continued on Page 42) historian of the Holocaust, disagreed. She favored building a memorial, one of ''compelling austerity,'' preferably in New York, ''the center of the Jewish population in the United States and the cultural crossroads of the modern world,'' she wrote in an early memorandum to the commission. At a meeting in 1979, she expressed her fear that a grandiose museum might give the appearance of ''celebrating rather than commemorating the Holocaust.'' She felt so strongly on this point that she, alone, refused to sign the recommendations when the commission's final report was issued in September 1979.

ONCE THE CONCEPT of a museum was endorsed, disputes over its enormous cost were inevitable. From the beginning, Carter insisted that no money for construction be appropriated from Federal funds. Moreover, Eizenstat says, ''Carter believed that because the project was not a war memorial, but of particular interest to the Jewish community, Jews should be able to raise money for it.''

Jews on the commission agreed. ''We thought it would look grubby for the Jewish community to seek Federal funds,'' says Hyman Bookbinder, a Democrat and longtime lobbyist for the American Jewish Committee. ''After $3 billion a year for Israel, it would have been unseemly to beg for $100 million for a museum.'' Hence, despite talk of the project's universality, pragmatists acknowledged that when it came to fund-raising, the museum would solicit funds primarily from the Jewish community.

As it turned out, even fund-raising turned into a politically explosive issue. Set Momjian, an American businessman of Armenian descent appointed to the council in May 1980, insisted that the Turkish mass deportation of the Armenians between 1915 and 1923, which had resulted in 1.5 million deaths, should be included in the museum as an example of a previous genocide. He pledged $1 million to the fledgling project on behalf of the Armenian community.

But when the Turkish Ambassador to the United States learned of this, he visited Stuart Eizenstat at the White House for what the Presidential aide called the most blunt and difficult meeting he had ever had.

The Ambassador reminded him that Turkey had been hospitable to Jews over the centuries. Though neutral during most of World War II, Turkey had given refuge to many Jews fleeing Hitler. In modern times, it has been the home of a large and thriving Jewish population, and it is one of the few states with a Muslim majority that has maintained diplomatic relations with Israel. Including the Armenians in the museum, Eizenstat remembers the Ambassador saying, would not only affect relations between Turkey and Israel; it would also mean that ''Turkey could no longer guarantee the safety of Jews in Turkey.''

Israel, concerned about preserving its relations with Turkey, quietly lobbied several council members to placate the Turks by leaving the Armenians out. In the end, the council ignored Turkey's threats; the Armenians would have a place in the museum.

Discord also emerged over the council's relationship with West Germany. From the beginning, the project troubled Helmut Kohl, then the leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union. In 1980, Kohl expressed his concerns to his key advisers, including Peter Petersen, a Christian Democrat and member of West Germany's parliament, the Bundestag.

''What would a young German visiting the United States think when he passed the Holocaust Museum on the Mall?'' Petersen says. ''What would he feel when he saw his country's entire history reduced to these 12 terrible years? Was this the way in which the United States was going to treat its most valued European ally?''

A friend in Congress arranged a meeting in New York between Petersen and Wiesel in the winter of 1983 to discuss West Germany's concerns. By that time, Kohl had become Chancellor.

''It was an extraordinary conversation,'' Petersen recounts. ''I told him about my background - that I had not only been a member of the Hitler Youth, that I had been an enthusiastic one.''

Petersen admits he had been bitterly disappointed when Hitler lost the war, and that he had initially dismissed the stories about the concentration camps as lies, Allied propaganda. But in 1945, his father brought a Jewish survivor home to talk to ''his crazy son who still believed in Hitler,'' Petersen says.

After hearing the stories about Bergen-Belsen, Petersen says his ''first instinct was one of shame, to flee Germany.'' But, he continues, ''my father got very angry. He told me: 'You ran after the Nazi flag like everybody else. Having done that, you do not have the right to leave now that your country needs you. You will stay here and work to make sure that what happened never occurs again.' So I did.''

Wiesel listened as Petersen made his appeal. More than half of Germans alive today were not even born when the war ended. The Federal Republic had worked long and hard to become an ardent supporter of democracy at home and abroad. Could the new museum not take account of West Germany's extraordinary evolution? Could it not include West Germany's help in building a strong Israel, in making more than 100 billion Deutsche marks in reparations? Could it not include some kind words about the new Germany?

At the end of the lengthy meeting, Wiesel and Petersen agreed to form a group of six Germans and six Americans to discuss what had been learned since the war and some of the other issues raised that afternoon. The group met first in early 1984. Through these visits, he and Wiesel became friends, Petersen says. Wiesel invited him and other German members of the group to attend some of the Holocaust council meetings in Washington so that they could better appreciate the memorial being planned.

''I came to respect Wiesel enormously,'' Petersen says. ''So when he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, I helped get 80 members of the Bundestag to write the Nobel committee in support of his nomination. When he finally won the prize, I attended the banquet in Oslo, the only German there.''

These contacts between the Germans and the Holocaust council ended abruptly after Wiesel resigned as chairman in December 1986. After Harvey (Bud) Meyerhoff took over, ''he reorganized our little group out of existence,'' Petersen says. ''I tried to (Continued on Page 47) meet with him several times. He and the others have always refused to do so.''

In fact, most council members had not known of Wiesel's invitation to Petersen to attend council meetings. Some were appalled when they were told, particularly Holocaust survivors. Council members confirmed that after Wiesel's departure, it became unofficial policy not to meet with German officials to discuss the museum's thrust or contents. ''I don't make deals with Germans,'' William J. Lowenberg, a survivor and vice chairman of the council, bluntly told a friend.

THE RELATIONSHIP with Germany, however, was not the issue that drove Wiesel from the council. What made him resign, he has said, was his growing concern that the project was becoming too politicized, too ''homogenized,'' and that these trends would ultimately degrade the quality of the tribute he had hoped to pay to Holocaust victims. ''Either this place will be a sanctuary, or it will be an abomination,'' Wiesel told a friend before he resigned.

Even Wiesel's admirers acknowledge, however, that his strengths were spiritual, not practical. He came to be seen by many on the council as a poor choice for translating the themes of remembrance and commemoration into concrete and mortar. He trusted only a handful of survivors and was reluctant to delegate authority, they said. Since the council met infrequently, major decisions piled up without resolution.

Wiesel felt himself miscast. He told one friend privately that he felt he lacked the pragmatism and management skills needed to transform his vision into reality. ''My monument is one of words,'' he said.

In the fall of 1986, Wiesel - aware that his council needed more funds - turned for help to the developers on the panel: Albert (Sonny) Abramson and, later, Meyerhoff. Within weeks of joining the museum's development committee, Abramson got the project moving quickly and on a much grander scale. Wiesel had favored opening a relatively small museum in two red-brick structures near the Mall, a building known as the Auditor's Complex. But the developer favored tearing it down and building a new, giant structure.

In November, Abramson demanded that his development committee be given authority to act without approval of Wiesel or the council, and he threatened to resign unless he was given more autonomy. He got it. But relations between Wiesel and the developer deteriorated beyond repair. A few weeks later, Wiesel gave up his post. His resignation, coming as it did less than three months after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, created even greater rancor within the council.

Wiesel had fought against individual parts of the museum being named after donors. Minutes from the council meeting of June 17, 1987, indicate that the executive committee approved two proposals that crossed that line.

First, it voted unanimously not to accept funds from either West Germany or the Soviet Union and to consider gifts from other governments and foreigners case by case. Second, ''Chairman Meyerhoff noted that in addition to the $1 million commitment from him and his wife, Lyn, the Meyerhoff family had pledged $5 million.'' The minutes state, without further explanation: ''The 500-seat Main Auditorium will be named for his father, Joseph Meyerhoff.''

Since then, the council has approved the naming of the museum's cinema-lecture hall for another large donor, the Helena Rubinstein Foundation. Michael Berenbaum, the council's project director, stresses that the council has banned named plaques in the heart of the museum - the Hall of Remembrance and the Hall of Witness. But some council members have said privately that they are uncomfortable with personal tributes as a quid pro quo for large contributions in any part of the building.

Another reason for Wiesel's departure was the bitter and growing competition within the Jewish community for membership on the council, a reflection of the disconcerting rivalry among Jewish groups to seize the Holocaust as their special preserve. Membership has not been growing in many of the established Jewish groups, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the like. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles is one of the few exceptions. By repeatedly making the Holocaust an issue in its fund-raising appeals and warning that another genocide could happen, the center has become the nation's fastest-growing Jewish organization. ''These groups are fighting for survival and for prominence,'' says Deborah Lipstadt, a noted scholar of the Holocaust. ''And the Holocaust is a very prominent issue.''

THINGS HAVE NOT gone that smoothly since Wiesel's departure. For several months last year, a critical debate raged within the council's content committee over how much and what kind of high technology would be appropriate in a museum that would highlight the danger of technology when it is harnessed for mass murder. ''When applied to Treblinka,'' says Berenbaum, the project director, ''it permitted 150 people to kill 900,000 in 18 months at a cost of 5 cents per person.'' The issue has been particularly sensitive because plans by the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance to make extensive use of glitzy technology have prompted charges that it is turning Holocaust commemoration into a Disneyland-type sideshow.

Many of the Holocaust survivors on the council's content committee would like the emphasis placed on the museum's collection of more than 16,000 Holocaust artifacts - striped camp uniforms, diaries of survivors, the ticket and passport of an ill-fated passenger on the St. Louis: the ship loaded with Jewish passengers that the United States turned away.

But even here ghoulish overtones are inescapable. What will tourists think of walking through an actual railroad car that took Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to their deaths at Treblinka? How will they feel about walking down a corridor on the original cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto? How will young visitors react to the planned display of a room full of camp victims' clothes, another of shoes and a third including victims' artificial limbs?

THE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM will not open its doors for three years, but a controversy has been building over whether such ''chambers of horror,'' as critics have called them, are the most appropriate way of commemorating the Holocaust in the United States.

Supporters argue that the museum in Washington is long overdue. After Israel, they note, the largest number of survivors of the Holocaust live in the United States. Americans had helped free those in the concentration camps. And America's defeat of fascism ultimately not only saved countless Jews, gypsies and others who would surely have perished, but also restored freedom, democracy and decency.

But many disagree. Henry A. Kissinger, who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938 and who supports a museum being built in New York that will place the Holocaust in the broader context of Jewish history and culture, opposes the Washington museum on pragmatic grounds. He voices fear that the national museum constitutes ''too high a profile'' for American Jews. Putting such a museum on national ground, he warns, might only serve to ''reignite anti-Semitism.''

Some question the wisdom of building a national museum that does not explore an American experience. Others ask whether such a museum can be truly honest about this country's past, or whether it will help promote self-serving history and false memory. Will it teach visitors that the United States did little to help prevent the Holocaust? That the United States did virtually nothing to stop the slaughter once it began?

Some fear that these museums, and a national museum, in particular, will serve to perpetrate what many regard as an unhealthy obsession with the Holocaust among some Jews. Without ignoring the genocide, one must ask: Do American Jews want their fellow citizens to see the Jewish people primarily as victims?

Officials of the Holocaust national museum insist that it will not lack dignity. But critics say that given America's fascination with glitz and kitsch, vulgarization may eventually triumph. If these critics are right, spending more on education, or building a simpler, more austere memorial, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, now the most frequently visited monument in Washington, may have been a wiser course.

Ultimately, however, views about how memory of the Holocaust can most honestly and effectively be shared with future generations is a matter of personal taste. If the critics are right, the memory of the Holocaust may defy the builders' efforts to enshrine it in brick and stone. In that case, less would have been more. But it will be the people who visit the national museum, or those who shun it, who will eventually decide its value.